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What we've gained in hi tech we've lost in manners

Trying to talk to someone whose eyes endlessly slip down to their iPhone screen would appear to have little to do with Lady Grantham’s cheese knife being laid in the wrong place.

But both are symptoms of Britain’s dying sense of etiquette. The Downton cutlery issue has got so, er, unbearable that Lady Carnarvon, the countess who owns Highclere Castle where the period drama is filmed, has started a blog. “Glasses are set back to front and things are set wrong,” she says. Gasp.

I don’t give a candied fig whether Carson’s crew boobed with their table-laying. But there is a real need for those social rules we call etiquette. It becomes more pressing after every meal with a friend’s dandruff, not them, since their head is bowed, prayer-like, over their smartphone. And every time someone thinks gazing at Twitter while on the Tube makes it okay to ignore the standing elderly. And every time a trip to the cinema involves sitting next to someone who spends the whole film firing off texts or noisily, unendingly, stuffing their face.

Debrett’s, the posh people’s bible that reckons it’s the “authority on all matters of etiquette, social occasions, people of distinction and fine style” (it clearly doesn’t reckon humble has a place in the modern-day personality), is worried about slipping standards. Really worried about them. Or perhaps just keen to capitalise on them. Anyway, it’s launching a “modern finishing” course for the under-30s.

The tenets seem to be stop phubbing (aka phone-snubbing) and start thinking of the perils of what Debrett’s calls “the hectic informality” of technology that mean “social graces can be a casualty”. For such gems, the five-day course costs £2,000 and includes a module in posture.

I reckon the kind of people who would shell out two grand on a “modern finishing” course, with role play, are just one harem of wasps short of a picnic. We don’t need to codify this stuff: guides to social conventions are the unwanted gifts that become toilet books — and even there, the spines remain untroubled. But whether it’s parents, schools (I hear teachers moaning already), or the occasional lunatic plonking a stranger’s rudely used phone into a tub of water, something must be done.

Our technological addiction developed Concorde-fast; now the repercussions are creating social turbulence. A decade ago we could easily go out for a meal without checking our nascent mobiles or they-were-cool-once pagers every few seconds. And yet nothing at the core of our lives has changed: we have not all become on-call surgeons; no one actually wants to see photos of Bob’s every meal, nor his tweeted post-meal report of indigestion. In any case, it will all still be there in half an hour, when the bill has been paid.

Despite Debrett’s best efforts, our technological addictions are unlikely to be reversed. We’re used to instantaneous responses to communication and feel dependent on the constant drip of social networking.

Yet etiquette, even though it sounds old-fashioned and is frequently hijacked by the pony set, doesn’t have to die out. Ranking real people above little bundles of electronics is a good start. And the castle-owning countess had one thing right: laying cutlery in the right place at a table at least puts a knife or fork in a diner’s hands, not a phone or camera.